> I think 99.999% of all coding/engineering is not like this example though.

No, it's certainly not. Even for really high-utilty personal projects, what you do, esp. when you compare to the previous example, is extremely simple. Some parsing here, some SQL there, a HTTP POST somewhere else.

Unless you're rendering something, developing a custom, binary file format, talking with the hardware, or doing something extreme like I have given in the example, most programming is very similar. Re-organizations of the very same building blocks.